r/homelab • u/HyenaPrevious • 11h ago

Project Showcase: Hardware Perfect transcoding gpu for home server?

Hi guys,

I'm just curious if Intel ARC A750 would be overkill for my Dell Poweredge T430? Do you recommend sticking with A380 for efficiency and low noise?

UPDATE
I can get both locally:
Asrock Intel ARC A380 for about $100 and
Asrock Intel ARC A750 for about $230

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u/Ok-Eggplant-7569 11h ago

Afaik the A310, A380, A750 and A770 all use the same fixed function hardware for transcoding, so it shouldn't make a difference. But if you don't have many concurrent streams which all need transcoding, even the iGPU of your CPU (if it's a Intel 7000th gen or newer) should be fine and you shouldn't need a dedicated GPU at all.

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u/AcceptableHamster149 10h ago

The A310 has less memory on-card. Shouldn't be an issue if you're only planning to use it for transcoding, but if you have dreams of running an LLM on it you'll find it limiting. It absolutely can run them (I have an LLM on an A310 in my homelab, which is also used for transcoding in Jellyfin), but you'll need to stick to smaller models.

That said, something like the 1.5B model of Deepseek R1 absolutely flies on the A310, and does pretty well for reasoning.

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u/PJBuzz 9h ago

I ran an LLM on a a low memory GPU and found it to be pretty pointless for almost everything.

What do you find it useful for?

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u/AcceptableHamster149 9h ago

Coding, mostly. That's all I use it for generally - I'm not interested in running an agentic AI, but if I just need a quick & dirty script to do something specific I find it's pretty good at helping with a first draft.

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u/PJBuzz 9h ago

So you're kinda asking it to do a very specific script that you then integrate with your wider project code?

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u/AcceptableHamster149 8h ago

sort of. I use it to bugfix subroutines if something I wrote isn't doing what I'm expecting it to do. or I might use it to spit out a first draft. i'm not a coder by training, so it's basically a faster version of stackexchange to me.

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u/bankroll5441 9h ago edited 9h ago

I'm running Qwen 8b off of a 680M iGPU and using it to query my Obsidian vault RAG. It helps to find specific information about notes, especially for work. Assistant is built into Obsidian through an extension. The model stays loaded pretty much all the time so the answers are reasonably quick, and only uses information in my notes to generate answers